[Baypiggies] April agenda?

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On 3/31/06, Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:
> READ THIS FIRST: two weeks is a relatively short setup time for what I'm
> proposing.  If someone is prepared to do a presentation or has a better
> idea for the meeting, please post NOW.
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2006, Tony C wrote:
> >
> >>>a live sprint
> >
> > Would someone describe what a sprint is ?
>
> Neal gave a good technical response; my thought for the April meeting
> would be to do something a good deal more casual.  Basically people would
> pair up [1] for extreme programming [2] on a small piece of a live
> project.  Either an experienced programmer would help a newbie with zir
> work or the newbie would work on something with the experienced
> programmer.  I'd expect that each group of two people would be working on
> something different from the other groups; the primary goal here would be
> to practice pair programming and test-driven development [3], not to
> actually get lots of work done.
>
> (As Neal pointed out, real sprints work best when there's a substantial
> tutorial for newbies; sprints usually last three or four full days.  It's
> not at all clear to me whether what I'm proposing would work, but if it
> does, it would be a good model for other groups training newbies.  Worth
> a shot, I think.)
>
> [1] http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/pair.html
> [2] http://www.extremeprogramming.org/
> [3] http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/testfirst.html

Aahz, I like your proposal!  Perhaps we can consider killing three
birds with one stone.  If we break the meeting up into three sections,
we can have:

30 minutes for talking about IDEs.  Hopefully we can get multiple
people to give 5-10 minute overviews.

30 minutes for answering random newbie questions.  Hopefully we can
inspire some real-life newbies to come ;)

30 minutes for random hacking.  This can include helping newbies with
specific problems, sharing editor configurations (my .vimrc is *da
bomb*), etc.

I think structuring the meeting this way might lead to a energizing experience.

Does everyone else like (+1) or dislike (-1) this idea?

Thanks,
-jj